Short answerBefore you cancel any SaaS accounts, export everything. SimpleClosure says 47% of its shutdown deals now include code or data sales (MIT TR), with typical payouts of $10K–$100K (Forbes).
1. Preserve before you cancel
- Pause any auto-deletion and retention policies.
- Export Slack/Teams (check your plan's export rights and terms).
- Export email archives.
- Clone all repos with full history.
- Export Jira/Linear, Confluence/Notion, Google Drive, CRM and help desk.
2. Inventory what you have
| Asset | Record |
|---|---|
| Code | Repos, languages, lines, commit history, whether it ran in production |
| Tickets | Count, years, links to commits |
| Messaging | Channels, message count, date range |
| Docs | Specs, PRDs, runbooks, postmortems |
Records that link across systems are worth more. Sunset prices on "data richness" (Forbes).
3. Check rights
- Open-source licenses inside your code
- Customer contracts that restrict their data
- Investor or lender claims on assets
- Platform terms (Slack's API terms restrict LLM use of API data)
4. Exclude and clean
Remove HR, health, payroll, legal and private DMs. SimpleClosure says it excludes employee and health records (Business Wire). See how to anonymize data.
5. Choose a buyer
Compare exit buyers in startup data buyers compared.
6. Proceeds
Sale proceeds in a wind-down generally go to creditors and investors first. Check with your counsel.
Frequently asked questions
Can I sell my startup's data when shutting down?
Yes. Services like SimpleClosure and Sunset broker shutdown data sales to AI labs, typically for $10K–$100K, per Forbes. Export everything before canceling accounts.
What startup data is most valuable to AI labs?
Linked records: codebases with commit history tied to Jira tickets, plus design docs and postmortems.